MEF announces board of directors for next year

The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) announced the names of its fiscal 2012 board of directors following elections at its recent annual meeting in San Francisco.

MEF said the board represented a cross section of the industry, with members from both vendor and service provider communities. Nan Chen, president of Cenx, serves as president, with Mike Volgende, director of advanced networking product transformation at Verizon being appointed chairman of the board. Kevin Vachon continued in his role as MEF's chief operating officer.

Other director appointments included: Margaret Chiosi, executive director of optics and Ethernet development at AT&T; Craig Easley, vice president of marketing and product management at Accedian Networks; Lionel Florit, senior manager at Cisco Systems; Arie Goldberg, CEO and co-founder of Omnitron Systems; Robert Kuse, director of commercial engineering at Cox Communications; Scott Mansfield, principal engineer at Ericsson; Kevin O'Toole, senior vice president of product management and strategy at Comcast; Raghu Ranganathan, senior advisor in the Office of the CTO at Ciena; and Ralph Santitoro, director of carrier Ethernet market development at Fujitsu Network Communications.

Zhao Huiling, vice president of China Telecom, was also appointed as an advisory director by the board.

Carlos Benavides (Verizon) and Phil Tilley (Alcatel-Lucent) will continue in the role of global marketing co-chairs. Bill Bjorkman (Verizon) and Ranganathan (Ciena) will co-chair the technical committee, while Eric Puetz (AT&T), Chris Donley (CableLabs) and Biren Mehta (Cisco) were named as certification committee co-chairs.

"Two key tipping points have been reached in this, our 10th year: For the first time, carrier Ethernet equipment sales have exceeded the combined total of legacy and alternative technologies, and U.S. Ethernet bandwidth has surpassed legacy bandwidth," Chen said. "Ethernet services for business-class applications are still on track to exceed their predicted $40 billion by 2014."